Legal Miscellaneous VII

Crises of democracy, by Adam Przeworski

(Cambridge University Press. 2019)

Przeworski has the virtue of seriousness. He doesn’t reach easy conclusions, sometimes he rather reaches intuitions to which he arrives by means of the serious and complete study of his subject. Perhaps it is not an author for the general public, but it is for all of us who are permanently interested in democracy.

Another virtue of our author is his intellectual honesty. He specifies what he understands by "democracy", for him this is "a political arrangement in which people select  governments through elections and have a reasonable possibility of removing incumbent governments they do not like" (p. 5), accepting that it is a minimal and electoral concept.

Continuing with the concern he expressed in his previous book (“Why bother with elections?”), Przeworski delves into the problems of democracy from the expectations that those who participate in the elections, both winners and losers, can form. Consider that they are a mechanism to peacefully process conflicts in society (not to end them) as long as several assumptions are met:

1. Parties can structure conflicts through elections, which implies a certain degree of control over their membership.

2. Parties have incentives to play according to the rules (which implies that they do not lose everything or win everything, or almost not definitively)

3. Representative institutions will have the possibility of dealing with  conflicts because all forces can participate in them.

Now why is there a crisis of democracy? The first thing to keep in mind is that the diagnosis depends on the definition of democracy, which in this case Adam Przeworski has already given us, therefore his ideas may not be applicable to other cases in which a broader definition or diverse. The second is that our author affirms that democracy fails when one of the following two cases occurs:

• The electoral results have no effect on people's lives. Everything remains the same even if the ruling elite is replaced.

• Those who win abuse their power to stay in government by eliminating or greatly reducing the competitiveness of elections.

The book makes a pleasant and pertinent review of different cases of failed democracies, likewise lists the main problems of current democracies through the results of different statistical studies. It deals with the issue of the weakening of these regimes, which has to do with the points already mentioned; largely in the weakening of the parties; It also addresses the weakening of democracy by the action of governments through a slide to authoritarianism that seems, step by step, constitutional, illustrating this with recent cases such as those of Poland, Turkey and Hungary.

He is moderately pessimistic (on a par with Madeline Albrigth, author of "Facism: A warning") and continues to insist on the undemocratic mood of our representative regimes. In the end it leaves an ominous message: this crisis that is being experienced has deep roots in the economy and in society itself.

In short, it is a well-written book, thought less as a best seller and more as a serious and responsible diagnosis. Of course I recommend reading it but I suggest, as in the case of any other book of this type, be careful when applying it without further ado to the case of a specific country, and start from the basis of what the author understands by democracy, either to share your concept or, if not, not to use it.